Remember the time when you would walk into a music store to buy CDs? What about the seeming hours you spent per week pacing the walls of the video store for that single gem that you would pay almost 6 bucks to rent--for only one night? What about the time you got your newspaper or magazines delivered to your house? Seems like decades ago? Now you can purchase music and movies anywhere: when once you would sit on the subway thinking about what movie to rent, you can now just sit in your seat and either rent or buy and even watch it right there. Your news and magazines come the same way--the headlines coursing through cyberspace faster and more dynamically than droning along the once-a-day conveyor belts of newspaper printers.
Ken Auletta of New Yorker: How Netflix Killed Blockbuster.
But these disruptions didn't come from the industry experts, as we now know; they came from technology companies with smarter faster machines and very savvy, emergent business plans that seem in retrospect miraculous. These disruptions have only happened over the past several years; and how many of us saw them coming? Very few...
The signs are there for all to see: self-driving vehicles are going to disrupt a lot of industries (insurance, auto, fuel, and transportation to name a few); and to be on the right side of these changes means that industry leaders need to be thinking seriously about the implications of self-driving vehicles now.
And we as consumers need to be thinking about these changes. When you look at your child, just think that they will most likely have no experience driving an automobile--the thrill and freedom of the open road and almost unadulterated autonomy... No--they'll be sitting in a vehicle that will drive them to a programmed destination, drop them off, and most likely drive away to pick up somebody else. For, as Attorney and editor of The Hollywood Reporter, Jonathan Handel, put it in Huffington Post, "Once a car learns to drive, there's no need to own it and there's no need for a driver. That's because the car can come when called, take you to your destination, then go off and pick up someone else." Yet another implication of self-driving cars that Handel explains, and is not evident, is that when driving oneself becomes unnecessary, such an activity will become rare and therefore more expensive, less convenient, and, ultimately, unlawful, simply because the cars will drive much better than we can.
Sit down, make an espresso, get online, have meetings: all these things will be a reality in the driverless car of the near future.
By virtue of the highly complex landscape maps that Google and other driverless vehicles use (that, incidentally, will only get more detailed and complex over time, and therefore orders of magnitude better) allow the car to have very precise knowledge of the road by virtue of which it can make quick adjustments to spontaneous hazards. Once this takes place, a driverless vehicle will become convention, and human drivers will be seen as posing even greater risks. Already, the cost of driver error--from fatalities to insurance costs--is very high; but when intelligent vehicles are able to significantly reduce, if not nearly eliminate, those costs, then human driving will not only be considered unadvisable but also simply unacceptable.
What this implies is that if such companies as Google are designing us out of the drivers seats of vehicles that will come online in 2020, then it will only be a quick matter of time before our licenses are pulled and registrations revoked. Like gun control, there will be vehicle control; and it's not implausible to think of the imposition of a regulatory annual human driver fee to deter the majority from engaging in such risky and wanton activity.
And it has tremendous bearing on the insurance industry, for as Chunka Mui, Contributor to Forbes Magazine and co-author of Billion Dollar Lessons, explains, "Insurance premiums are a direct function of the frequency and severity of accidents. In a world of driverless cars, where accidents are significantly curtailed, most of the premiums will go away. . . . [which means that] the market might be reduced by 75% or more."
But is this just a lot of blown smoke--futuristic babble that is purely speculative and the stuff of sci-fi? You might think, "Well, these technologies are way out in the future, and will have no bearing on us for another 50 years..."
While this may be a common way of thinking, the reality is that such disruptions may take less time, as Moore's law and Ray Kurzweil's research on exponential growth show. Indeed, according to Kurzweil, there is a million-fold growth of technology every year, which exponentially will become quickly over time to billon-fold increases. In such a world, self-driving vehicles will be a very simple reality.
Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity and the surging pace of exponential technological growth.
We are living in a very complex and surging technological world. Many claim that more change has taken place in the past century than over the last 1000 hundred years. And now, more change will take place over the next ten years than the last 100. Indeed, with the doubling of information technology every year, the world's knowledge doubles with it, which both opens up new opportunities and comforts as well as greater risks, and, overall, pressure on human biology to somehow keep up.
Self-driving vehicles are already a reality. Where they go from here will be determined by ever-emerging exponential technological growth. While we have information from which to make inferences about the next 10-20 years, to think that things will simply continue along a linear path and thus be pretty much the same is a very serious oversight.
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